On Michelle's second week at Codefresh, she was making an important decision - was Foqal going to be the platform she will use to help her lead her team out of their Slack support troubles.

One of the first problems she had to solve was a lack of visibility - no way to monitor the number of customer requests being created, no insight on the distribution between internal and external requests, or how many hours agents spent supporting Slack. Without visibility, she couldn't accurately predict headcount or how her resources were distributed between handing Slack and email requests.

Shortly after our first meeting, Michelle knew this was not just a vendor but a long term partnership. She gained visibility into the number of requests, which customers were the most active, and which agents were handling the most customers. With that knowledge she was able crush her goals and adjust her team priorities to better suite the customer needs. She transitioned Anthony's focus to Foqal which allowed him to come up with a process that best suites the needs of the team.

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With the visibility gained through Foqal, she was able to trust that all the customer requests were being properly handled and was able to divert her attention to other needs among the team. She could trust that no customers were getting left behind.

Ownership Empowers Agents, Creates Accountability

If you are doing support, you know about the importance of ticket assignment and clear ownership. But how do you do ticket assignment or any type of ownership in Slack?

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In talking to Michelle, she says before Foqal, the only thing they could do was hope that whoever answered the customer first continues to monitor the thread and continue to respond. But with agents going on holidays or weekends, things could easily fall through the cracks. This was a problem that resulted in requests being escalated to Codefresh leadership.

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By Implementing Foqal, ownership became obvious. Agents can assign tickets to themselves, to others, or transfer ownership if needed. They can see all the tickets assigned to them, those unassigned, and those that are completed. By implementing Foqal, Codefresh was able to prevent all customer driven escalations.

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In summarizing his experience Anthony said:

"Being able to assign a Slack thread to someone ensures that customer issues that previously fell through the cracks have a greater degree of observability, ownership, and traceability. We have a method of following up on it. Its harder to forget about when there is a ticket opened and someone owns that ticket."

Stop Context Switching

Technical support teams have a hard enough time with context switching - one customer is asking about login while another is asking about a product feature. Having to also remember which channel and thread the request comes from, who you are talking to, and doing it before another agent responds leads to unnecessary frustration.

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With Foqal, Michelle and team were able to reduce the amount of context switching for their team. Since agents only see the small subset of tickets assigned to them, they don't need to first hunt for the answer to the question and then hunt for the channel, thread, or direct message where to respond. Clear ticket ownership ensures only one agent is working on a ticket at a time - preventing the unnecessary frustrations of duplicate work.

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Due to routing and assignments, agents can focus on the tickets they know how to answer and assign or automatically route the questions to other agents when they don't know the answer. This means Michelle's team can focus on the tough questions not on the process of responding.